I have little love for Canonical, but I wouldn’t go that far. What makes an OS ‘the Windows’ of something is in my eyes the heaps of useless surveillance, which ubuntu lacks.

I’ve been using opensuse tumbleweed for quite some time on my systems, and been pretty happy with it, in case you need an endorsement.

All of those, including Counter Strike, are preying on addiction and should either be illegal or at least regulated

I’ve worked with people who seemed like that. But they usually had partners they loved, parents they mourned, there was depth and emotion and humanity somewhere, even though they where horrible to interact with in the office. An LLM doesn’t have the capacity for that.

I don’t think we’re gonna reach a green branch here, to be honest.

They are made of equations though. I think that’s the main point of contention here. They are not a simulated brain.

I can’t see how they could, on a technical level. They are a statistical model that predict the likelyhood of the next token based on the relation of tokens in training data. There’s nothing approaching any kind of thought process or understanding happening there.

4-12 out of 10000 humans apparently have one extra finger/toe on one or more of their extremities.

Yeah, it’s a lot to enable mobile payment. Personally, I just bought myself a nice wallet. Much less hassle.

Also, conditions will vary depending on which Sparkasse/Volksbank you look at (they’re all independent and might have very different fee and offer structures), but they’ll likely all have more fees than most large private banks.

The thing is, they have some good projects like these independent mobile payment apps, and are great for giving out loans to smaller, regional businesses, but as banks for private users, they definetely aren’t the best available.

Lol, can see that. But there’s been times I lugged around separate company and private laptops. Two phones is tame in comparison.

No.

Well, it really depends. Both aren’t one single big bank, but a lot of semi-connected local banks. They are huge disparities in what e.g. Sparkasse München and Sparkasse Hinterpfaffenhofen can offer. The bigger ones mostly have proper online services, but might require a letter for some stuff.

Regarding savings accounts - from what I’ve seen, most of the products they offered weren’t really competitive, and mostly relied on you not shopping around. Volksbanken, as a co-op, allow you to buy shares in the bank, which can have a pretty good return, but there is a relatively low limit on how many shares a single person can own, so no one can have outsized voting power.

So, bit of a mixed bag, really.

Also, all of them (I’ve seen) have a new account, and all their text output seems LLM generated, with them claiming it’s cause english isn’t their native language and they need LLMs to translate - on that note, that’s suspect to me, cause translating a human written text, at least with dedicated translation services, tends to retain a human structure. This feels more like they’re generating the whole message.

Doesn’t apply here, but some also had a story about “working in X trade for Y years”. It all feels very disingenuous, very much like marketing. I’d be surprised if even half of these projects are still around in two years time.

Rant over, just something that grinds my gears.

Here in Germany, it’s pretty much Sparkassen and Volksbanken. One are city/state owned, the others are pretty much a co-op.

This is pretty Germany specific. Heard from friends elsewhere they had some luck with local options, but don’t have a list Handy rn.

Less powerful than current gen consoles, though.

CPU and GPU are soldered to the board. Only effective upgrade are system memory and storage. Think if it as a nuc or laptop board.

It’s not just the price, it’s the hardware. They could have gone for a slightly more powerful gpu, even in their thermal emvelope, and it’d xonfpunding they didn’t. This way it gets beaten by a PS5, on both price and performance.

Doesn’t mean I’d buy a PS5, but does mean there’s many better options, even if you want small and quiet.

Makes sense. I always liked the symbolic act of shutting down my work issued phone when I didn’t need to be reachable, but I see the convenience here.

Yeah, I was thinking of separate profiles in general, and had never encountered the concept of an employer controlled separate profile. When I needed a device for something work related, I usually got issued a phone.

If it’s actually a total deal breaker for you then … probably?

There’s several EU countries that do. Some of them as part of a push for sovereignty, but most, I think, cause they developed their solutions before Google Wallet was enabled in that country.

It’s probably illegal in Germany and some other EU countries. Not that that always stops Big Tech. But this one, at least in Germany, could land the user some jail time.